Tag: drug cartels

‘Baby Driver’: Reflections where facts are more dramatic than fiction

Even through the new film Baby Driver isn’t quite out yet I think it’s safe to say that my own car chase story Tail of the Dragon is still the most intense action packed of its kind ever put to paper by a human mind to date.  But I’ll have to say, when I wrote that story, I was thinking about movies done in the style of this soon to be Edger Wright classic.  There is room in our culture for a lot more of these types of stories and this one has hit me hard with anticipation for many personal reasons. First of all, since I first heard the song “Radar Love” by the Dutch Band Golden Earring in 1973 I have wanted to see it used as a backdrop for a car chase of some kind and it looks like Edger Wright has done it.  Second of all, by the previews shown so far, the main character of Baby played by Ansel Elgort looks remarkably biographical to my real life between my 17th and 19th years of life.  After all it was those experiences which provoked me to write Tail of the Dragon to begin with—to get all that out on paper.  So it makes me very happy to see movies like Baby Driver getting made and that several of the Fast and Furious movies have continued to push great box office numbers in theaters.  I hope the same for this one—I am very excited for it.

I’ve alluded to it before but after watching these trailers it may be time to get a little more specific because the Baby character just in these previews speaks to me with quite a bit of reflection.  I understand his dilemma.  It was only a month or so ago where a political enemy of mine had looked me up on one of those online searches trying to get dirt on me, and they were stunned at what came back to them.  It showed over 17 hostile interactions with law enforcement and this person sent me that information hoping to get some leverage on me because I’m now living the life of a respectable citizen and they thought I wanted to hide that past.  What they didn’t know is that I consider my actions back then—at that critical juncture between youth and adulthood–to be very respectable—even though it might have been on the wrong side of the law. All I ever wanted was freedom—real freedom—and I wanted to be a millionaire quickly and just step over the nonsense of fighting it out the way I saw was making other people miserable.  I did live heavily in the fast lane and I was willing to use those skills to acquire all the money I could to launch a family and when I found the right girl for me—those people didn’t want to let me out of that lifestyle—and many conflicts ensued.

If I were ever have been said to have an addiction it was probably speed, the kind you get from driving a car extremely fast.  Like I said, as a youth when I first heard the song “Radar Love,” I was thinking of it playing to excessive speed in very fast cars.  The very first person I remember admiring as a young man was Evel Knievel so even at ages 5, 6, and 7 moving fast and recklessly was pretty much all I thought about—so when I was finally able to turn 16 and buy my own car I was ready and I quickly made a reputation for myself. My very first traffic ticket for excessive speed was on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving in 1984 where I was in a race with a Trans Am that clearly out powered my car at the time.  So the only way to win was to have more nerve than he did—so I flew through a swarm of cops parked at the Tri-County Mall in Cincinnati on the wrong side of the road at well over a 100 MPH—against the traffic.  When the police got the radar gun on me they caught my speed at 85 MPH in a 35 zone.  They would have taken me to jail for reckless operation but one call to the Sharonville police station told them to just issue me the ticket.  I was under the protection of the senior judge in that district and literally had a get out of jail free pass given to me by him—because I did work on the side for him which was related to a mob outfit in Chicago—and they wanted me free to do it.

The way that Kevin Spacey’s character is portrayed in Baby Driver reminds me precisely of one of my first “bosses.”  This guy ran a car dealership that I worked for and from that I had to do more than just sell new and used cars.  I did repo work and they liked me because I had no reservations about danger—as people obviously didn’t like having their cars taken back when they failed to make payments. I was always very eager to sneak up to someone’s house and take their car without being shot, and people did shoot at me while doing this kind of thing.  It was very exciting and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  These days repo guys aren’t allowed to do some of the things we did to get our cars back so for me it was a unique opportunity to live very dangerously and get away with it legally—and make great money doing it.  But then again, the car dealership was a front at the time for cocaine dealing—as a way to launder the money and all these repo jobs were ways that this Kevin Spacey style “boss” could check to make sure I wouldn’t be a rat—because they needed a driver to help deliver regionally.

I had my limits of course.  I didn’t mind the danger or the drama of court appearances and the continuous threat of jail—but I did not like drugs.  So when the dealership sent me with another senior car salesman down to Over-the-Rhine to deliver cocaine to a distributer operating across from Union Terminal it was in my precious car which had survived many high-speed encounters and for which I was particularly attached to.  Of course they didn’t tell me what we were doing—they let me believe that the whole operation was going to be a unique repo job, so I didn’t ask what was in the suitcase in my back seat. But I did think it was strange that we didn’t take a company car on this effort—as we typically did.  This was my car and the salesman smoked—and because we were not in a company car I had a little sign on my dashboard telling passengers that there was no smoking allowed. In fact, people who knew me also knew my very strict policy against drug use. So this forty something drug dealer who was very rich I might add, was very upset with  my rules and promised that I’d have a hard time when we got back to the office.  So things weren’t getting off to a good start. When we arrived to the destination he left the suitcase in my back seat and told me he’d be right back as he went to the door of the townhouse where the target lived. While he was in there I took a peek at what was in the suitcase and I saw that it was cocaine.

Over the years up to that point I had a reputation of not flinching at anything.  I knew some of these people I was working with were serious criminals and some were very powerful politicians and sports stars.  I was with them as a body-guard at times even though I was very young, and as an assurance that no matter what happened I was their ticket out of it.  They had never asked me to directly commit a crime—but rather used me as a lifeline back to freedom—and I was very dependable.  But, I had just met my future wife and I was thinking of living a normal life that we could build a family with—and once you’ve been invited to those types of circles—they don’t want you out flapping your mouth about every little thing you’ve seen.  They’d prefer you to be dead or with them—there really isn’t any middle ground.  So with drugs in my backseat I left that guy down there and headed back to the sales office where the mission started and reported back to my Kevin Spacey looking boss that his partner at the dealership was selling drugs.  He looked at me exasperated.  “You left him there?”  Of course I had to tell him yes and there was about a half hour of excessive panic because this Over-the-Rhine distributer had a ruthless reputation and now he had to call in for help while he was in hostile territory.  I was commanded to go back and get him for which I refused.  They had to send someone else.

Maybe I’ll write about the details sometime about what happened next but needless to say the Baby Driver plot reminds me of the two weeks that followed. I can really sympathize with the Baby character especially at that time in my life.  I wanted to be married to this wonderful new girl and I wanted away from those types of people—and it wasn’t easy.  A lot of people got into a lot of trouble and I had to drive very fast a lot to stay out of both jail and this side of the dirt—because these people did play for keeps. It seemed like a long time then, because at only 19 years of age, time moves more slowly, but in reality it was all over in just a few months.  Things worked out for me the way I needed them to.  It was a tough adjustment to live without the level of money I was used to.  Just out of high school I made twice as much money as my dad did at the prime of his career, but my country club wife assured me that she wanted to do everything clean and that holds true to this very day.  It took a while, but eventually I was able to climb out of that hole in my lifestyle—and it was all worth it—especially being able to live and tell about it.

It doesn’t happen often but just watching the previews for this new Baby Driver movie set to “Radar Love” took my mind instantly to this very turbulent time and I won’t even pretend that it was all bad. I loved living like that. It was fun to live beyond the rules and to be so good at things that people would literally do anything to make it so you could keep doing it.  For the first seven years of my marriage I didn’t have a driver’s license because once I stepped away from that life the courts crashed down on me and it wasn’t easy—the penalties were severe.  That past kept clawing away at me trying to either pull me back in, or destroy me in the process—it took about an entire decade to finally outpace that lifestyle I had before my marriage.  People had to die off and the fast life caught up to many of them who did manage to live for the next decade.  They either destroyed themselves or they ended up in jail.  There wasn’t really any middle ground.

Needless to say, I feel a connection to Baby Driver and I really hope it does good business during its run.  Speaking from experience I think what’s worse than a life of crime is a life not lived.  The spontaneity of life is a magical thing and you often don’t really see it until you are pushed well beyond your comfort levels.  And even though he is villainous in this movie Kevy Spacey’s character is right—people do love a good heist—they do need something to talk about over their “lattés” Thinking of “Radar Love” and the way the scenes played out for the preview of Baby Driver, I feel quite a lot of satisfaction knowing that I gave plenty of stories that have been talked about over a great many lattés.  And in the great theater of living, that’s not a bad thing.  I can’t wait to see Baby Driver.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The Truth About Stonehenge: Comments about the absurdity of summer solstice rituals

Visiting Stonehenge for me recently was one of the most important things I’ve ever done. It wasn’t just a bucket list item that I wanted to see at least once in my life—it was crucial. I have read so many books starting at a very young age where Stonehenge was contemplated that I needed to see the place in person. But to get to it you have to make a trip to England—and to do that you have to see a lot of other things and London usually has some part to play in such an expedition—so enough time in a schedule is necessary to accommodate such a task. However, this year I was able to get there and it was everything I expected and more. More than anything I was extremely impressed by the position the Neolithic complex held on the high plains of western England and the relation that all the mounds in the surrounding countryside had with the ancient stone ritual center. I think Stonehenge is remarkable in many different ways and its history is quite vast—much deeper than what the type of people who showed up at the summer solstice events which happen every year where druid loving people watch the sun rise on the longest day of the year.

I watched the events that these types of people participate in and it actually makes me pretty mad. The druids were not in any way involved with building Stonehenge. Their Celtic heritage is just another rendition of the modern nature worshipping hippie—the earth first losers who plague our modern politics with wishy-washy sentiment rooted in a new religion—making Mother Earth the new Yahweh or Shiva. For them and their followers of the modern age—Stonehenge is an earth worshipping symbol that a bunch of second handers from the region of Germany adopted to have sex parties and conduct themselves foolishly while under the ground dating back over 10,000 years were the relics of civilizations’ origins waiting still to be discovered. The reasons for Stonehenge’s alignments to the sun and other celestial bodies go far beyond the natural worshipping druids.

Yet like the American Indian the true meaning of the people who built Stonehenge goes undetected because intellectual curiosity cannot get past the necessity for spiritual redemption. Even the people studying Stonehenge cannot help but be pulled into the earth worship distortion that people like these druid lovers bring to the site during real archaeological study. When I was there the obvious layers of observation was distinctly obvious. On the surface, you have all these conclusions that are wrapped up in the methods of druid mythology which has always been associated with the site—unjustifiably. The druids came along many centuries after the final stages of construction at Stonehenge in 2500 BC. But to look properly at Stonehenge you have to be willing to look at Old Sarum to the south and Avebury to the north—as well as many hundreds of earthworks over the 50 miles of regional coverage. There was a lot going on in that region of England dating from the end of the last Ice Age to the relative present of 4000 years ago. For many millenniums—much longer than our present age—the Stonehenge region was very important and it goes well beyond the need to worship the earth.

Dating back 10,000 years—at least, are the skeletons of many sacrificed animals. What we know of Stonehenge and its modern rocks were built on the sacrificial site of these animal bones. Even in recent years—the last stages of Stonehenge after final construction, human sacrifices where happening with frequency—many of them quite brutal. I’m inclined to think that the stone alignments with the various solstices had less to do with celestial worship and more to do with keeping track of their progress throughout the year—likely to mark the points in time where interactions with important events occurred—such as when it became known how to calculate complicated mathematical concepts among a bunch of supposed nomads hunting and gathering for their entire lives and doing nothing else. Somewhere along the line of this 10,000-year span something happened that made people do remarkable things in that rather unremarkable landscape.

Then there is the problem of understanding that the builders of Stonehenge were not a regional phenomenon, but a global one. I am quite convinced after visiting Stonehenge and seeing things with my own eyes that the same people who built that place were also in North America building the many similar structures still seen all over the Americas. We are likely looking at a society that was much more advanced than we give it credit for, and was likely part of the culture that existed all over the world prior to the time the Book of Genesis was written. Many calculate that the Great Deluge took place around 2348 BCE which is just a few hundred years after the final touches of Stonehenge so we are dealing with more than just mythology and Earth worshiping killers. We’re dealing with a particularly potent hidden history that is right in front of our faces—yet we hide the truth behind our recent religious inventions—and that is compelling.

Evidence of life—even giant stones like what we see at Stonehenge do not last very long. Once you apply 20 or 30,000 years of wear to anything it often becomes unrecognizable and that to me is the most compelling aspect of the Neolithic monuments surrounding the Stonehenge area. Without question to me the same culture that built Stonehenge ended up in some way in North America and likely China. Without question, there were global sea trade routes moving all around the world at a time when we think of the people of Stonehenge as being separate and rising independently. The evidence simply doesn’t support that if you look at everything instead of just the Stonehenge complex. And then there is the case of the American Indian—they are obviously from the China region and settled in North America as a separate transaction of migration and they were interacting with these Stonehenge people—whoever they were—well before the druids walked out of Germany. All this is very revolutionary and certainly changes what we know about our own history. That’s why I so badly wanted to visit the site in person as opposed to reading about it as I have so much. It is clear that even lifelong researchers into Stonehenge are trying to fit it into what we know about science, instead of letting history properly tell its story with us being a willing audience. We’ve tried too hard to shape the narrative to fit our comfort level.

The biggest question about Stonehenge is—why there, and likely that answer is due to events that occurred before the Ice Age even happened. The uneventful plain of land in western England did not suddenly just pop up all these really remarkable monuments—something inspired people to do these things at a great cost to themselves—and that is where we need answers—and we’re not going to get it by watching a bunch of hippies worship the sun. I think the reason the sun was so important to all these ancient people clearly marks their need to demonstrate to the political masses a way to tell time. The sacrificial elements that often come out of collapsing societies tend to be what we study but the initial cause is where the focus should be. Why, and why there?

The mathematics involved alone extend well beyond the achievements of Greek study—it is time to accept that Greek and Roman empires were only ages and that all this had come before in times long forgotten. I think Stonehenge says to us that society wasn’t so primitive—at least aspects of it. People may have come from the surrounding countryside to become part of something bigger, and wiser at Stonehenge, and Avebury, but the people who built all these things were far less nomadic than we want to admit. They were rather advanced and that is something we need to deal with. They were a global society, not a regional one. It may take us 100 to 200 more years to find enough evidence to support some of the things I’ve said here, but the evidence is stacking up, and much of this is obvious. We just need more evidence before re-writing history books. But mark what I’m saying here, these druid rituals are just a bunch of left leaning hippies who are trying to use history to justify their religion of Mother Earth worship. They are as loony as the fools who sacrificed other human beings at Stonehenge trying to make it rain. They are not the builders of Stonehenge, or the causes for why it’s there to begin with. They are just more of a second-hand civilization riding the coattails of greatness and hoping that they can loot the credit for it over the lens of history. So far it has worked for them, but the evidence emerging is telling us the truth, and they are certainly blind to it.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The Call to Adventure: A 52 Week Project which photographs authenticiy

It was strange recently getting yet another notification from the Ohio courts of Butler County that I’ve been selected for jury duty because my name ends up in the hat so often due to my voting patterns.  I noticed while filling out the form which included my wife and kids that none of them have what you might call—“traditional” jobs.  My wife is a happy housewife, my oldest daughter a professional photographer who is very highly sought after and my youngest is an illustrator.  As I write this she, (my youngest) is doing a commission piece on the Batman villain The Joker shown below.  But none of the ladies in my family have a “traditional” job where they go to work, punch in and sell away their day for cash.  I know that’s the typical way that we measure economic success, but I’ve always been a big supporter of that type of freedom—especially for women because they tend to invest more into children, households and the emotional nurturing of a family as a whole.  When people are free of that primary concern of having to sell away their time for money, it allows them to invest in less tangible aspects of family building, so it makes me proud to see that among the women closest to me, they are all on that type of path.  They don’t have a “boss” out there they must yield to, and that is something I think is very important to family development, because it makes them the authority figures of their own lives which is why that question is asked on a jury selection form.  Attorneys obviously want to know that the people in their pool are “normal” people miserable like everyone else—so the way I answered that question likely will knock me out of the selection process.

My photographer daughter has really impressed me; she is taking her business to a new level as seen in these included videos.  She’s doing something called the 52 Weeks Project where each week she is picking a subject to photograph then she shows how she comes up with the shots and how the editing process goes on arriving at the final product.  She’s a full-time mom, but on both of these efforts she was up at dawn before her little boy woke up wanting breakfast and conducted these pictures for her project squeezing in a lot of creativity into an already packed day.  She’s been busy with booked appearances for several weeks now and coming up shortly after this publication she has a photo shoot in Chicago.  So what you see here is a very developed photographer who is expecting herself to be one of the great ones.  What she does is out of pure passion which I liken back to having the ability to be free of having a “boss” in her life who governs her away from home while on a time clock. That freedom has allowed her to expand her personal life in ways that I think are quite extraordinary—and necessary to achieve the level of art that she is shooting for.

Even her subjects are unique in the scheme of the photographic community.  Her first entry into the 52 weeks project was “A Call to Adventure” which I thought she managed to squeeze a lot out of while working in a very limited area within Cincinnati.   For those who don’t understand why a “Call to Adventure” is important it’s a classic motif most appropriately defined by Joseph Campbell in the telling of mythologies.  Usually after the first act of a movie or the introductory phase of a novel the main character is faced with a jumping off point from the static patterns of their normal life and into the promise of adventure provoked by some dynamic force. For some people the “Call to Adventure” might be as simple as a stranger approaching you from the back of a cab at a stop light while you’re walking to work in New York and asks you to help them get to the airport.  You must then decide to help or not because if you do, the static patterns of your day will be disrupted and that could have unpleasant consequences.  Then for others it might be an opportunity to fly to Cambodia to do sex traffic rescue work in some steamy jungle nightmare, but while there you make a new archaeological discovery that changes the world perspective on our knowledge of history.  The “Call to Adventure” is often how you can dramatically enrich your life for the better with vast experience, but to do so you must step away from your static patterns and allow dynamic forces into your life.

For instance, a friend of mine who worked on the Trump campaign in 2016 called me on a very busy day last week and asked me if I could appear on CNN the next day.  I had scheduled a lot of events and I really didn’t have the time.  After all I had an oversea meeting planned at the very same moment I was supposed to be on with Anderson Cooper.  So did I answer the call and go on CNN which was likely just going to do a hit piece.  As it turned out the CNN people were very gracious and were not the kind of gotcha people who Rush Limbaugh surmised when he talked about the event on his show.  I did the CNN segment along with some other peers and it got people talking and was fun to do.  I still managed to get all my work done—although it was different from my usual day and I could point to many times in my life where answering the “Call to Adventure” directly led to some very unusual experiences which ultimately enhanced my life.

I have learned over time to never get too rigid about things.  The “Call of Adventure” is something I consider so important that I often go out of my way to find it with a very laissez-faire approach to living and personal management.  I may start the day with all kinds of planned activities but by the end of it, I end up doing things I never thought I would at the start and that comes from saying yes to the “Call of Adventure.”  So it made me particularly proud to see my photographer daughter out there capturing not only dramatic photos but articulating that difficult concept artistically.  She, standing at the entrance of a forest goes back to some of the great Arthurian legends of the Middle Ages where the knights would all enter the forest of their various adventures at different points basically to establish that no two paths of adventure were the same for other people.  People must pick their own paths in life to be living truly authentic lives so here was my kid showing this rather difficult concept to explain with a simple photograph.  But as you can see from the editing process, it’s not so simple.IMG_4644

This brings me back to the importance of my girls not being encumbered with a traditional job—especially while raising their children.  If they put their children in daycare, there would be many fewer opportunities for the kids to experience the wonder of a life lived authentically, because the static schedules of daily living prohibit it—and true intellectual learning is often crippled in children as a result.  But for a mother who is there ready to answer that “Call to Adventure” at the slightest provocation a simple trip to the grocery store on a sunny summer in July might lead to a lifetime of discoveries that stay with young people forever because if the schedule of acquiring food is relaxed there may be opportunities for adventure that come up along the way—someone might need help changing a flat tire or a snake may be caught under a car in the grocery store parking lot and need help getting over to the cool grass before somebody runs it over.  You just never know—but there is tremendous value in following the “Call to Adventure” and it makes me feel very good to see that my daughter has matured to a point where she can understand it well enough to photograph.  That takes talent!

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Trump is Not Guilty of Obstruction of Justice: The case as to how Comey broke the law and is the real villian

Before anyone says that the legal opinions provided here are not valid, because I’m not a practicing lawyer, let me just say this.  It is not good to be overly specialized in one particular field of endeavor. Every person should make themselves well versed in many aspects of human society and its inventions—and law is one of those inventions.  It is just as good to know the basics of the legal profession as it is to know how to change the oil in your car.  The declaration that one should not have a legal position because they aren’t playing golf with county judges on Saturdays doesn’t mean that opinions of great merit cannot be made.  But in my case I do have quite a lot of legal experience in law even to the point of representing myself in court because I deemed legal counsel ill-equipped intellectually to do so on my behalf.  And I have always been successful in these endeavors even when the other side threw in a lot of resources hoping to tip the scales of justice.  In that context I can say with certainty that Donald J. Trump absolutely can never be prosecuted, impeached, or in any way penalized for obstruction of justice in the White House over the James Comey termination.  Trump is free of guilt 100%–unequivocally.  Here’s why.

Clearly from the testimony I heard James Comey give Trump fired the former FBI director based on merit—meaning Comey had failed at his job.  When Comey started his testimony rehashing his work experience using the many times that President Trump had told him he was doing a good job, he was seeking to cover-up the later opinions which led to the termination with feel good language designed to illicit a cover-story—which is typical of most government employees who find it difficult to live within the parameters of reality.  Government work tends not to be merit based, but viewed more as an entitlement—so Comey’s testimony was geared to support that false reality.

Putting Comey’s account into direct comparison with Donald Trump’s—if I were the judge sitting in a chamber debating the legal positions put forth I would have to conclude that Comey was insecure with his job performance during the fall of 2016 and his new boss was a merit based individual which was terrifying enough to the FBI Director.  So Comey hoped to keep his head low and avoid any confrontations with Trump.  To secure his job he let it float that he was going to conduct an investigation into the Russian connection to ensure that Trump would never fire him for fear that the optics would look terrible.  This is why Comey agreed to help the Obama administration spy on Trump’s transition team hoping to gather up some evidence to use in case the new president decided to pull the plug on Comey’s remaining six year’s appointment as director of the FBI.

Upon meeting Trump, Comey realized that dealing with the star of The Apprentice for 14 seasons was going to be a lot tougher than the former community activist, Barack Obama was.  Obama had to completely rely on other people to make value judgments making Comey much more important in discussing matters of intelligence gathering.  Trump on the other hand had his own opinions about things—and knew how to read people and make value judgments completely free of other people’s opinions.  This really worried Director Comey because as a person—he was functioning from deep insecurities regarding his masculinity—likely cultivated through his years working closely with other Washington D.C. types in that bubble of the Beltway where rules were known and unconsciously followed.  Trump was a departure of that thinking and had earned his way through life on his own merit which made Comey very uncomfortable due to his own lack of such experiences.

This is why Comey felt he could clear the room in a December meeting for a one on one discussion with the new President—because the FBI director had the institution of the FBI at his back and felt he could trust it to protect him from someone like Trump. But with each subsequent meeting thereafter Comey realized that Trump was reading him too well.  The dinner invites and other discussions on the phone and elsewhere revealed that the now President Trump had doubts about the Obama appointee.  Making matters even worse, likely, Comey had been listening to the Trump people at Trump Tower in New York and knew Trump’s true opinion of the FBI Director.  Trump, like he would anybody in business, was sizing up Comey to decide if he wanted to continue having his FBI led by such a guy—because he wanted to make his own mark and put his own kind of person in place.  So when Trump shook Comey’s hand where Trump would say—“you’re doing a good job,” Comey suspected otherwise either by direct evidence from spying on Trump, or from his own knowledge that this new president had the skills to sniff him out in a crowd for being not very effective in his job.

Trump appears to have been vetting Comey from the start.  He was willing to give the FBI Director a fair shake because some of the timing of the Comey comments on the Hillary Clinton email scandal did help Trump in the election.  But Comey obviously was not a Trump supporter and the way the big man avoided eye contact and shook hands concerned Trump.  Comey was too sneaky to be trusted so Trump’s many personal meetings with Comey were like the boardroom on The Apprentice—to assess the merit of the FBI Director to decide what to do with him.  The assurances that Comey had been doing a good job were to put his mind at ease so that Trump could really get to know the man on a basic competency level.  Through those meetings Trump learned that most of what Comey was had been purely show and that competency at the level of his job heading the FBI just wasn’t there.  Obama might have liked Comey—but what did he know?  Trump wasn’t a fan and by February was leaning away from keeping the Director on as an appointee to the President.

When Trump asked the room to clear in the Oval Office to speak directly to Director Comey just days after Trump had to fire General Flynn, at one level the President was seeking relief for his friend—who had been through enough of a witch hunt from the press over the whole Russian thing.  Yes, Flynn had lied to get the job, but Trump being a loyal guy wanted to let the General recover in peace from further scrutiny.  Plus Trump didn’t want dark clouds to interrupt all the optimistic things he wanted to do as president.  But more than anything, Trump wanted to strip away the various institutions that people like Comey rely on to hide their lack of competency and he wanted to speak to the man one on one knowing that many of the leaks that had been coming out of the various intelligence agencies were pointing directly to Comey. So having all that stripped away, Trump wanted to be sure that the man standing in front of him was really a sleaze ball who was still very sympathetic to the Obama administration and had botched the case with Hillary Clinton to make his Beltway friends happy with him during cocktail hour with back slaps and future dinner invites.  Comey knew enough about people to know that the president could see through the careful façade he had constructed over his many years of public service—so he was naturally uncomfortable.

After the meeting Trump made up his mind—he just needed to find the right time. Trump and Comey never spoke together again after April 11th.  And it was after the Comey testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3rd that Trump had heard enough.  During that testimony Comey admitted that it made him “mildly nauseous” to think that the FBI had affected the 2016 election and that he failed to prosecute Hillary Clinton because of pressure he had received from Loretta Lynch.  Comey’s testimony showed a FBI Director who made bad decisions based on political pressure and that was all Trump needed to terminate Comey’s employment which occurred on May 9th—a few days after the Senate testimony.  Trump had given Comey a shot and the news just kept getting worse the more the President had dug—really leaving no other choice.

Thus, the termination of James Comey from the FBI had nothing to do with the Russian case.  By Comey’s own testimony to the Senate on June 8th 2017, he stated that his termination would have no impact on the Russian case—that the FBI work would still be done with or without him.  That means that the termination could never have been about the investigation, but was always about the merit of the work Comey had done as director.  If the termination had no impact by the admission of the person who had been removed, and his own testimony revealed that Trump had never asked to have the Russian investigation terminated—then there was never anything close to obstruction of justice.  Trump had simply rooted out a drain in the swamp that once he pulled it, a lot of things hidden were suddenly visible.  Comey was one of those drains holding back a lot of swampy water and once removed, the slimy water of the Beltway went down the drain exposing a lot of crazy critters who needed concealment to survive.  And now they didn’t have it. They screamed “obstruction of justice” to regain those hiding places, but nobody was biting and now they all have a lot of trouble.  So with all that said, only five months into a new presidency full of contention and conflict from the other political side, Trump successfully found the drain on the swamp—and he pulled it—and James Comey turned out to be a big part of what was wrong.  It didn’t take the new president very long to figure it out—just as James Comey had feared after the first direct meeting he had with President-elect Trump in December.

Trump is innocent of obstruction of justice, and Comey is guilty of leaking classified information with access to the highest office and placing it in the hands of a Columbia college professor to leak to The New York Times.  If Comey thought his termination was a bad day—he hasn’t seen anything yet.  There are many more bad days coming because the person who broke the law wasn’t Trump—it was Comey and his swamp who have now been exposed like never before—and it is an ugly sight indeed.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-james-comey-timeline/

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The Butler County Connection to the Comey Testimony: CNN comes to town to put Trump supporters on the spot–but come up empty

I almost felt sorry for them, the team at CNN who came to Butler County, Ohio to gloat over the Comey testimony ended their day rattled to their basic foundations.  If there is a place in the United States harder core Trump—I can’t think of where that might be except out in the fringes of the cityscapes to the east of Ohio and West Virginia.  Butler County is special because it’s a strong hold of Republicanism.  It’s the home town of John Boehner—had been a huge supporter of John Kasich for governor and eventual presidential candidate.  But most recently it was responsible for helping Trump stamp out a 9 to 10 point edge over Hillary Clinton during the last election.  Given that CNN had spent so much political capital on a smoking gun emerging during the Comey testimony they invited a lot of those Trump supporters down to Rick’s Tavern in Fairfield to witness the public execution which was later filtered out on the Anderson Cooper show later the same day. Their assertion at CNN was that there was smoke and that Trump was guilty of something.  But all that smoke ended up being where smoke grenades thrown by them and others in the media to make it look like there was some fire.  Even though I’m not big fans of the people at CNN, it was embarrassing to see them up close when they came to realize it on live television.

Comey wasn’t fired to hide an investigation into Russian hacking.  He was fired because he went on just a few days prior to give senate testimony and admitted he was a befuddled, insecure person who didn’t know how to proceed and he had lost the confidence of the FBI as an institution due to his show boating during the Hillary Clinton events of 2016.  Here was a guy whose claim to fame was putting Martha Stewart in jail, who made himself into a national sensation for trying to withdraw a wire tapping order while John Ashcroft was in the hospital but was beat to the punch by the Bush White House.  Comey had a history of working against the White House when Obama nominated him to lead the FBI four years ago and obviously thereafter the same standard of prosecution did not apply.  If you put Martha Stewart and Hillary Clinton side by side, case by case-Hillary Clinton should have had the death penalty thrown at her compared to Stewart.  Here was a woman in Clinton who really committed crimes at the highest level, shared classified secrets and destroyed evidence—and she was running for president.  Comey fumbled the case and sought to cover up his tracks with a lot of legal talk which nobody understood to hide his incompetence.  And he got caught. He let the Democrats nominate a criminal for the White House and when they lost the election, it has all but destroyed their party.  So Trump’s loyalty comment was in that line of thought.

https://www.usnews.com/news/newsgram/articles/2013/05/30/james-comey-fbi-pick-took-on-martha-stewart-and-dick-cheney

The entire day all CNN wanted to do was point to the loyalty question as if it indicated guilt over Russian collusion—and that this story was bigger than Watergate.  Only there was no collusion.  Trump isn’t the kind of guy to share the spotlight with anyone—especially Russia, and as a business executive, he wants his own people to be around him—not some Obama holdover in the FBI.  But Trump knew he had to give the guy a chance—because it would look bad to come into office and fire all of Obama’s people.  That left Trump to do what a lot of head hunters who slip into executive slots as head of corporations do—you watch and listen to who does what.  Then you replace the weak links with your own people as you learn the ropes.  Comey admitted to the senate that he made judgment errors when he indicated he was “mildly nauseous” that he might have swayed the 2016 Election.  After that comment from my own vantage point I knew he had lost the hard line officers at the FBI as they were surely eye rolling the Comey statements and if I had to guess, that was the moment Trump decided to fire the FBI director and make him a “former.”

I don’t think Comey is a villain in this case—he was just over his head.  The character he made himself out to be—an Eliot Ness type of FBI agent—couldn’t hold up when the media no longer liked him.  He was fine so long as the people he was going after were the Bush White House and Martha Stewart—but when the villain was Hillary Clinton whom the entire Washington D.C. establishment supported—he found him stuck between a rock and a hard place—and he didn’t handle the pressure well.  When he shouldn’t have, he went on the air and gave extensive press conferences and spoke too freely which exacerbated the situation beyond redemption essentially forcing Trump to fire him.

Comey’s comments about feeling anxious to be alone with Trump are classic emotions when a guilty incompetent person is left defensively with a superior boss.  When other people are in the room it takes the edge off—but when you know you are guilty of not doing a very good job and you are alone with someone who can see through you—of course it would make a person like Comey nervous.  CNN wanted to make that story into one where Comey thought Trump was corrupt and the purity of his nature wouldn’t allow him to deal with the president one on one.  That is pure fantasy—in reality, Comey knew he was guilty of screwing up the Clinton case and he hoped to stay out of trouble long enough to keep his 10 year appointment by Obama.  He knew that Trump would soon learn that Comey wasn’t the best man for the job, so he had no desire to spend time alone with the president. That caused Comey to do  two more stupid things; give a public speech about how everyone was stuck with Comey for another 6 years hoping to put pressure on Trump to keep the FBI director on for fear of political backlash.  Then he gave his senate testimony mentioned above where he gave a number of statements that were just embarrassing.  Trump did the right thing and fired Comey—then he stood by his decision without a lot of politicking.  He simply said that Comey was a showboat—which was true, and that he hadn’t done a very good job.  End of story.

It’s one thing to watch these stories from afar, but to see CNN up close trying to wring out a nothing story was absolutely fascinating.  But they came to my town, to my community to catch Trump supporters live on the air with what they hoped would be administration ending testimony—and they didn’t come close to getting it.  I didn’t feel sorry for them because they were after all part of the insurgency against traditional America.  But they were people, and however wrong they were philosophically, they were still human beings suffering under a false premise that had not carried the day.  They were part of a losing, and declining effort in America and they knew it.  They took one last shot in the dark hoping to score a hit in Trump Country, and all they got were a bunch of supporters like me and several others who defended Trump valiantly.  And it wasn’t hard.  The truth has a way of showing its own majestic presence, and the CNN people were trying to make something out of nothing.  The world is literally on a precipice, given the elections in England today, the terrorist attacks in Europe, the events of the Middle East—the strange chess game in the east—the world is changing dramatically.  But for CNN, the pivot point was with the Comey story and they went all in on it—and they came up with nothing.  And they chose to do it in Butler County, Ohio—which was a mistake for them.  I enjoyed being a part of it, and I enjoyed watching them lose. But as people I know it was painful.  However in war—who cares.  Move on and prosper.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Megan Kelly’s Looks can’t save NBC: The Valdimir Putin interview that was a disaster

I was more than a little embarrassed for Megan Kelly during her big NBC Sunday night show debut interview with Vladimir Putin. I’m not a big fan of her anyway with how she conducted herself at Fox News previously—but I understand she’s a power climber and is on that path hell or high water.  But walking into that interview with Putin on his home turf—on ground he controls—was pretty stupid.  As she tried to push that NBC, New York Times, Washington Post Russian conspiracy story against Donald Trump she came out looking very unprofessional by the former KGB agent who was obviously outmaneuvering her with every question.  Putin knew what she was going to ask and he was more than prepared for her—which worked very much to her disadvantage.

Anyone who has read my book Tail of the Dragon knows I’m not a blind supporter of law enforcement.  To me they are just people and I have a real problem with authority figures because honestly, I’m smarter than they are and I don’t trust my life to people not as capable as I am.  But I’m not an anti-cop dissident like the communist Ferguson rioters either.  Now that Trump is president I’m starting to like the White House again—but for the other branches of government—they have a long way to go before they earn my respect.  So regarding the “Deep State” which is essentially the mosquito infested waters of the swamp Trump wants to drain I don’t trust any of them.  Vladimir Putin may be a ruthless old KGB agent who has spent most of his life working against our own CIA—but I trust him much more than I do people like James Comey, Barack Obama, and James Klapper.  When Putin says that Russia wasn’t involved in the American election and looked at Megan Kelly wondering why she would even ask the question, I believe him over them all day long.  I think our American intelligence has been corrupted beyond recognition and I wouldn’t trust them to tell me that there was a door in front of me even if I had my hand on the knob to open it.  They are pathetically corrupt and the Trump presidency is bringing that into a full light.

I knew Megan Kelly had lost the interview when she tried to assert that the American media was in consensus with American intelligence that Russia had colluded with the Trump campaign. That word, “consensus” assumes that just because a majority of people believe something that the facts of it are altered into the tapestry of reality.  This mechanism is currently being used to justify the religion of global warming—if a majority of scientist (who receive federal grants and will believe like prostitutes anything told to them so long as a check is involved) believe that the climate is changing based on man-made influences rooted in capitalist endeavors—then it must be true. However, such a belief is foolish, a fact is not changed just because a number of people believe it to be true.  Belief has little influence on the physical nature of molecular structures—so physical reality cannot be altered magically with the mind.  It is fun to think of Disney movies where you can have a pleasant thought experiment and reality changes allowing people to fly around—or in Star Wars where physics is altered so that people can move things with their minds—but these are just fantasy ideas lazily built around the concepts of science fiction and fantasy, where reality is challenged by the imagination—which can be healthy.  But physical realities cannot be ignored when serious thought is applied to science.  The power of a mass democratic belief system cannot overtake reality—and essentially the political left—here represented by NBC News, hopes to believe that just because people believe Russia won the election for Trump that the facts of reality would be altered to fit that line of thinking.  It doesn’t, and Putin obviously had a good time making a western journalist look completely foolish.

Yes, Megan Kelly got her big interview, just as she did when she tried that prime-time slot with a Trump interview months ago on Fox. That didn’t work out either—so landing the big gig isn’t the same as being successful in the results.  With all the bad press that Megan is getting out of this Putin interview, she would have been better off not doing it at all.  NBC should have known better, but they are obviously desperate these days to stay relevant in a changing television market—so they spent all their pennies on this big interview only to come away looking pretty stupid.  These are not the days of good journalism that I remember from the CBS Evening News and 20/20 which I used to watch religiously as a kid on ABC.  We used to make fun of publications like the National Enquirer for being all about tabloid news, but now they look like a legitimate organization in comparison to what NBC is producing.  Sharyl Attkisson, Barbra Walters, oven Diane Sawyer—but Megan Kelly—not at the same level, and Putin expertly tore her to shreds.  Such an embarrassment for NBC news.  Their hatred of Donald Trump has harmed them irreparably. They obviously hired Megan Kelly for her feud with Trump during the campaign and they are hoping they will get the same kind of attack dog from her at NBC.  They forgot to check her actual talent level as a journalist.  Megan used sex to sell herself—to climb out on top of the many other women who are equally capable.  But sex can only take you so far and now she is being exposed.  With Barbra Walters, nobody thought about what she looked like.  We watched her because she was competent and asked the kind of questions we all wanted to know—and she was personable enough to get people talking.

Megan Kelly’s interview with Putin only pulled in about 6.1 million viewers which was really embarrassing for her key demos. She should have been able to break through 10 million with her name recognition and having one of the highest profile interviews on planet earth.  That tells me that people really aren’t interested in her or the way she frames her news stories—which is so anti-Trump.  Her entire interview was an attempt to set the stage for the Comey hearings this Thursday where the network producers really think that they will uncover this mythical Russian connection.  Putin certainly didn’t help their case leaving Megan Kelly looking desperate—and then the Trump administration announced that it would not evoke “executive privilege” during the Comey testimony before the senate.  Obama did in regard to “fast and furious,” and other things—which is as good as an admission of guilt.   Trump didn’t which is really a big story when placed alongside these other headlines.  NBC is in real trouble.  Once the legs on this carcass finally stops moving with their life support—they’ll be left with nothing to work with, and Putin could tell.  That’s why it was so embarrassing.

I expect to have the best country on earth represented better in our news media. I have nothing against Megan, until she represents me poorly, and she did.  I’m also embarrassed at our American intelligence agencies.  I have little faith in them to do anything right.  The Deep State has ruined the integrity of all our institutions and that isn’t alright with me.  If the federal government were filled with employees like Perry Mason, or the Dragnet guys with Joe Friday doing the investigations—I might get excited about our team.  But these federal guys these days are a bunch of losers.  I wouldn’t trust them to microwave popcorn let alone handle the security of my life and family.  And it’s obvious to me they were willing to do anything with a compliant media to bring great harm to Donald Trump even if it meant starting World War III with Russia to achieve their Deep State desires.  As I’ve said many times in the past I am something of a very proficient judge of character and after watching Putin in action I think he orders hits on his reporters and rules with an iron grip—but that he’s honest in his involvement regarding the American election.  He didn’t have the resources for it, or the political will.  In some cases, he would have been better off with Hillary because he could push her around the way he did Megan Kelly—not because they are women, but because they just aren’t that mentally acute beyond surface conversation.  But for the good of a sustainable world, Trump was the hard choice everyone had to make—even Putin.  But as far as putting themselves as a country out there—there wasn’t much they could have done.  Hillary did all the work herself.  If we learned anything from the Megan Kelly interview it was that Putin had nothing to do with Trump’s election—and for NBC—that is a bad sign for them over the next four years.  They’ve put themselves on the wrong side of history and Megan Kelly’s looks won’t save them from stupidity.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’ was Great: Don’t listen to the critics, Disney needs to make a lot more Pirate movies

I think if you’ll look carefully dear reader you’ll notice two things about the newspaper reviewers who gave Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, a bad review.  They are severe liberals who hate Donald Trump and they are suffering from “daddy issues,” meaning they have some predilection toward not wanting to think about their dads for whatever reason.  One thing that was extremely obvious about Dead Men Tell No Tales—which is a recurring theme in all the Disney Pirate movies, is that the famous Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey of reconciliation with the father is used extensively.  If there is any fault in the film it’s in that the writers and producers are primitively stuck on that one theme—which for Disney is the formula.  To understand why, just read The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the classic Joseph Campbell work and you’ll understand why.  But other than that, Dead Men Tell No Tales is a great movie that was a lot of fun.  It’ll be a very successful movie and Disney should continue making a lot of them.  Hopefully they will.  The movie remarkably lacked any politics.  Disney wasn’t trying to slide any gay characters under the door and the romance themes were traditional and the whole thing was about adventure and discovery.  It’s one of those movies you leave the theater feeling good about much the way the ride in Disney World feels.  And Disney could continue making Pirate movies forever and people would still see them because they want to feel those things when coming out of the theater in their home towns since they can’t go to Disney World everyday.

But this hatred that reviewers had, particularly at The New York Times and at the ultra liberal Rolling Stone magazine was so pathetic for its desperation.  Their primary premise of hate was that the Pirate movies where the same old story lines—nobody had evolved.  Jack Sparrow’s story arch had no evolution to it—he was the same character that he was in the first movie. Basically, the reviewers have this idea that unless a movie deals with progressive causes like gay rights, feminism, wealth redistribution and plot points where the state takes care of everyone—then any movie is a bad one.  Of course Dead Men Tell No Tales isn’t about any of those things which is one of the reasons its good.  I mean I’ve been very hard on Disney for leaning toward progressivism when clearly their primary audience is Trump conservatives and they have been hurting their own market share by sticking in gay plot points and other acts of lunacy to appease the Democrats who now run Disney as a company.  But that mistake wasn’t made in this fifth Pirates film.  And it’s certainly not a conservative film by any means, but what movie is?  Conservatives are used to being ignored at the box office.  As the weekend numbers came in I found myself happy to see people went to see the movie in spite of the negative reviews showing the big newspapers how irrelevant they truly are in the 21st century.

All these industry people have already put their own nails into the coffins of Hollywood film making.  The grim reality for them is that only movies like Pirates from Disney can really be economically viable in this modern environment where they view the film making industry to be on the solitary mission of spreading liberal causes to the world.  Instead of making a movie that everyone can make money off of from the actors down to the promotional people, these industry idiots provide critics of movies as if the only reason people pay a lot of money to see them instead of waiting for the home market to show them from the comfort of our living rooms is to lectured to by Hillary Clinton supporters who would demand we all be more liberal.

There was nothing wrong with Jack Sparrow or Johnny Depp’s performance.  There’s nothing there to reflect the off-camera trouble of Johnny Depp’s rough divorce or his financial issues.  Anybody who writes anything otherwise is reaching—and trying to make something out of nothing.  If I were to give Disney any advice I would say make more Pirate movies and make them less as giant ensemble pieces and more about the adventures of Jack Sparrow.  All Pirates of the Caribbean movies don’t need to have huge casts like Dead Men Tell No Tales did and they all don’t have to be pinnacles to the survival of the human race to be good movies.  The character of Jack Sparrow is a lot like Bugs Bunny.  People would go see Pirate movies just to see how Johnny Depp’s character would get out of the latest mess.  Watching the execution scene in Dead Men Tell No Tales made this very apparent.  Jack Sparrow makes these movies fun and people would pay money just to see that character survive some new invention of malice, like at the opening of the movie where he wakes up inside a bank vault with the wife of the mayor trying to rob a bank but instead had passed out drunk and in need of escape.  Jack Sparrow could travel the world on such adventures and people wouldn’t mind a bit.  They’d still spend a billion dollars per picture at the box office and Disney could save some production costs.

On that note I think the Pirate films should be more like the new Star Wars movies—a new one should come out each year.  Bring the production costs down into the $150 million range and just let them do their thing.  There was nothing “lazy” about this Pirate movie as reviewers seemed obsessed in disclosing.  It’s not easy by any means to make a movie that looks as beautiful as Dead Men Tell No Tales from the special effects people, to the costume design to the wondrous score this time by Geoff Zanelli using themes created by Hans Zimmer.  This was movie making at its best and every new Pirate adventure doesn’t have to be on the scale of Dead Men Tell No Tales or At World’s End.  Like the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons, we knew and expected the animated rabbit to survive the aggressions of Yosemite Sam and the Martian, but what we wanted to see was how.  Disney has a nearly perfect character for that kind of thing in Sparrow and they should use him more.  Who cares what the industry thinks about milking the Pirate franchise for everything they can?  People in Hollywood want to work don’t they?  I would personally love to see a new Pirates film every year and if they only made $800 million each—so be it.  It would be good cash flow for a company that needs it—everyone needs it.  So why not do it?

Everyone should go see Dead Men Tell No Tales.  Don’t listen to the critics; they have no idea what they are talking about.  Movies are all about the feeling that this latest Pirates films provides—good fun that the whole family can enjoy together.  The correct formula for a motion picture really isn’t any more complicated than that.  I know when I’m having a bad day I put on one of the Pirate movie soundtracks and let the Jack Sparrow theme song cheer me up with his laissez-faire approach to life.  It works, in the same way that the character works in the movies.  I know that may be hard for the Disney Corporation to get their minds around, but all they really need to do is put Johnny Depp on-screen dressed as Jack Sparrow—pick some point on the map  and let the story tell itself.  Add the special effects in post production to fill in the gaps and just pump out as many Pirate moves as you can over the next decade and let movie fans have some fun without the politics.  Everyone would be better off.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Looking Forward to, Summer: Michelle Cline of Hickory Ridge High School is what’s wrong with public education

There is nothing wrong with women who have small breasts. And there really isn’t anything wrong with women who are smart—the smarter the better. But let’s face it, women—especially liberal women who claim to be all one voice speaking in unity the virtues of feminism, have an extreme dislike of women who are both voluptuously gifted, and smart, because they know that there are many options available to such women and the feminists are infinitely jealous. In fact, you could say that behind most butt ugly feminists who arrive at middle age—manless—or with those little wiener tag-alongs that often accompany such women to middle-aged dinners—it is their lack of access to good male genitalia that is often their problem and they hate other women who do have such access. They become feminists because misery loves company. And if I had to bet money on the motivations of the lunatic principal Michelle Cline of Hickory Ridge High School, North Carolina when she harassed and suspended a graduating student who was wearing the type of clothing Europeans typically love—it wasn’t a dress code she was concerned with. It was the dismay she had with the honor’s student named Summer who had both great intelligence and attractive physical features which set the unhappy 44-year-old women into a power-hungry fit.  Here is the story as reported:

A senior at Hickory Ridge High School in Harrisburg, North Carolina fears her future is in jeopardy, and it’s all because of a shirt.

According to an NBC affiliate in North Carolina, Summer wore a long sleeve green shirt that exposed her collarbone on Wednesday. During lunch period, she was approached by her principal who asked if she had a jacket.

In the suspension notice from Hickory Ridge High School, the principal told Summer to cover up with a jacket.  The report stated Summer responded with, “I think my shirt is fine.” The principal then told Summer that her lower back was also completely exposed, so she was not in compliance with dress code. Summer repeated again, “My shirt is fine.”

According to the report, a friend offered to loan her a jacket.

http://www.oxygen.com/blogs/honor-student-with-44-gpa-suspended-over-long-sleeve-shirt-cant-graduate-with-peers

http://www.cabarrus.k12.nc.us/hickoryridgehs

http://heavy.com/news/2017/05/michelle-cline-hickory-ridge-high-school-principal-summer-dress-code/

Biologically speaking we should all be proud of Summer.   As an attractive young woman, she could have simply decided to rely on her looks to carry her through life because what feminists fear most is that voluptuous breasts will still give women access to powerful men usually of the woman’s choosing.  Where some meat-head looking chick would have to go begging for a date, women like Summer have to be selective in who they spend their time with during the courting rituals that typically occupy the time of young women.  Summer as we can see will be as successful in life as she chooses to be because beauty does have a market value—and she as an individual is in command of it—which drives feminists nuts.  But Summer wasn’t happy with just her looks, because as all smart people know, looks last only so long.  By the time you’re thirty years of age people start to stop looking at attractive women and you better have something else going on in your head if you want to stay relevant.  Because by age 40 nobody wants to sleep with you except for other people’s rejects—and that’s not fun.  Being smart, building your life correctly from the start with as few mistakes as possible are the keys to living a good life—especially if you’re a woman.  Those who fail to do this become crazy feminists angry at life—and Summer obviously isn’t one of those young women.  She’s doing the right things so far.

But even worse than a young woman in a public school who is pretty, and is smart is a student who has a mom that loves her and in this case, Summer has that too. Crazy liberal teachers like Michelle Cline believe that the public school is the primary instructor of society—and that the parents are secondary.  Of course, they never admit this openly, but their actions confirm it.  Parents are meant to be ruled over.  So when Principal Cline who had worked her way up from a lowly teacher to run the Hickory Ridge High School targeted the young Summer as a potential threat to her own existence as a modern feminist—mom stepped in to remind the school that her parental role in her daughter’s life was more important than the public school.

I don’t know Michelle Cline personally. I’ve never spoken to her.  I’ve not met her.  But looking into her face—I know her.  I can see the way her goofy eyes look back at the camera what kind of person she is and I can say that I’m sure she plotted for a long time how to ruin the life of Summer in some way while she still could—before the young lady moved up and away from her grasp.  Michelle you see had to work so hard in her life just to have mediocre results and she really had to kiss some serious ass to become the principal—yet Summer would cruise through life with beautiful looks, a great work ethic, natural intelligence and a mother who loves her—and that just drove the homely Cline crazy with manipulative rage.

I could be wrong, and we could all be struck by lightning at the same time on a perfectly sunny day—concurrently. Anything can happen in life.  But I doubt I’m wrong—as I’m usually not.  In fact I can’t remember the last time I was wrong about something honestly.  As news reports jumped on this little story in North Carolina everyone sort of danced around the real issue.  We should never give someone like Michelle Cline authority over our children.  Anybody that insecure should not be in charge of anything.  If they want to teach kids things, then teach.  But getting drunk on power is something that should not be endorsed by anybody getting a salary from the tax payers—which Cline does.  This is the real problem with public education—it doesn’t exist to make kids better or smarter, otherwise the school would bend over backwards to accommodate people like Summer—good kids who just want to make a good life for themselves.  Instead, public schools are committed to ruining children and destroying their relationship with their parents in nasty liberal ways of undermining their natural authority. It wasn’t Principal Cline who was there helping the young Summer learn to walk, learn to read at home and engaged in hours and hours of mental development through conversation—it was Summer’s parents.  Principal Kline only existed to help put a little icing on the cake—yet she assumes to take all the credit by trying to undermine the young woman in one great jab—hoping to secretly to derail the enterprising honor student on last time before success might find her.

It is hatred that is at the heart of such people. On the outside they often speak of wanting to help all people through altruism, but often people like Michelle Cline hope that pretty girls end up as strippers, whores and otherwise physically destroyed by unwanted pregnancies so that those vibrant young looks will quickly be washed away by the guilt of abortions and countless cigarettes looking for love in all the wrong places.  Meanwhile the ugly, the stupid and the corrupt find safe passage under people like Cline because they are not a threat to her power—power long gained through climbing the liberal ladder and greasing the right skids only to get a little truffle in life—an overpaid principal job that means nothing to anybody outside of that little brick building called a school. Meanwhile, Summer, she’ll have opportunities that people like Cline will never have and it’s not just because she’s a beautiful young woman in full bloom, but because she’s smart.   Feminists don’t like smart women—because they know better than to subscribe to the hatred that feminists have for life.  And that I would bet is why Summer was suspended.  The dress code was just the excuse.

Summer’s future isn’t over just because she didn’t walk across that stage to get her diploma. It may feel like it now, but that silly ceremony doesn’t mean a thing in the context of life.  But what she did in defending herself is to be much commended.  Rather than just taking the issue she fought back in the media and has obviously won.  That is the best way to graduate that there is—and she’s doing it.  As I said before, there is nothing wrong with people who aren’t physically and intellectually gifted.  But there isn’t anything wrong with people who are either.  Summer is fortunate to have both—and that is something to be celebrated, not torment.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The Good Work of Sean Hannity: Why Buck Sexton is wrong about the Seth Rich murder

Sean Hannity has been doing good work at Fox News for a long time.   But I have noticed a huge difference in him over the last few years as he has become more involved in martial arts—his reporting naturally has been more fearless.  As a person he is functioning from a position where he’s just not afraid of the mass pain that the collectivist lefties use through peer pressure to manipulate things in their favor and that has put Sean Hannity out in front while some of the old big dogs like Bill O’Reilly have fallen to the ankle bitters.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I wish for everyone to study some “martial art” so that you can make your life as fearless as possible.  Nobody should make decisions out of fear so by having some way to defend yourself against those who wish to use force to drive your opinions—you can be free of their intentions and do justice to the truth if you learn something in the martial art professions.

In my life I have not only had martial art experience as taught in the eastern philosophies, but I have been a bull whip expert for my entire adult life and I have used it often to keep villains away from my existence.  It has been very useful. And these days my Ruger Vaquero along with my fast draw rig is my very best friend in life.  I’m older now and can afford a hobby like fast draw shooting and I love it.  But in the back of my mind it is just another form of “martial art.”  It is nice to know that if someone has a gun pointed at me and my gun is still in a concealed position—that I can draw and fire before they can even react to my movement.  Those kinds of things allow people to be straight with each other and use honor to govern their interactions—and I think every human being alive everywhere in the world should experience such things.  By learning something that can defend you and your family from the force of others, you inspire the world to be more honest.  And that is what I see different in Sean Hannity as opposed to virtually everyone in the news business.  He has only gotten better over time and I think it’s because of his dedication to martial arts which then carry over into other aspects of his professional life.

As he is doing great work in defending President Trump, Julian Assange and the conservative movement in general, the political thugs out there are trying to knock him off the air the way they did Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes—by attacking the advertisers. Sean being keen on martial arts thought has learned how to block and while reporting on the explosive Seth Rich story, managed to get out in front of those efforts by reminding everyone what the left is up to behind the scenes which is great.  If I were running Fox News now that they have screwed up with what they did with Bill O’Reilly losing the 8 PM time slot to Racheal Maddow of all people—I’d put Hannity at 8 PM, Tucker at 9, then that Five show at 10.  The Five just doesn’t do it for me in that prime spot.  As I’ve said before, I don’t want to hear from the political left.  I get that during the Bret Baier news hour—I don’t want that during the prime-time hours.

I can say that now that O’Reilly is off at Fox I watch Lou Dobbs at 7 during dinner then go into my shop to work on reloads and shooting practice until Hannity comes on at 10.  I listen to Bill O’Reilly on his podcasts during this time so I’m not watching Fox—which is why they are now losing to the other networks.  I’m sure there are many others who feel the way I do.  I don’t want to listen to a bunch of lefties.  I have a special place for them in my day, but once that’s over—I’m done.  For entertainment purposes, I want to be around my own kind of people not hearing the wasted efforts of the progressive left who hate everything and have taken an alliance with the very nature of evil in this world.

Sean Hannity is really the last man standing and his coverage of Seth Rich has been phenomenal. The DNC has real trouble, they are down on fund-raising, they have no candidates who aren’t socialist losers and their future is bleak.  I think they know the only way they can stay relevant is to drive people like Sean from the airwaves so they can completely control the message and if any of their own step out of line, they kill them—which is what I think happened to Seth Rich.  They are a desperate party with a lost message that this new President Trump is going to outshine and they know it.  They are like mobsters and back when Seth Rich was killed, they thought they were going to win the election and maintain control—and that they’d get by with it the same way Hillary got by with her email crimes—or Donna Brazil got by with cheating during the debates.  Cheating and killing is what they do—and they do it so that when you are dealing with them that you fear for your own life and will yield to their demands if you want to continue living.  Let’s face it, that’s what the Democratic Party stands for.

I was doing some cowboy reloads for my .45 Vaquero after Bill O’Reilly was done and was listening to Buck Sexton whom I like well enough on The Blaze. He’s pretty good with Trump coverage so I catch him here and there but I couldn’t disagree with him more over the Seth Rich case where he doesn’t think there is any fire to the smoke.  I know Sexton has experience in “intelligence” but from my experience in actually knowing “hit men” I am sure that the DNC put out the request and that it was executed to the specificity of their desires.  In my teen years—a long time ago—but not enough to not be relevant to this discussion—I was friends with three hit men.  None of them were friends together but they all knew each other and me through a special relationship with a very respected judge in Southern Ohio.  They killed people and the judge knew about it and all the members of the various political parties knew what was going on.  The press knew it, the business owners knew about it and the old Cincinnati Bengal players that I hung out with knew it.  We all knew what these guys did and if your name came up on their request list, they’d come after you.

These hit men were really just normal guys except that they liked to kill people and they needed the law enforcement buy-in to do their work. As a 17-year-old I had several dinners at a big round table where one or two of these guys were there along with the judge and other important people and they all spoke on a first name bases knowing what their roles were.  The reason I was there was because they liked me and I had a personality where I liked to compete and they respected that.  I endeavored to have more nerve than those guys so they enjoyed teaching me things.  In many cases they had destroyed their personal families by living on the edge so their relationship with me made them feel like they had some value to their lives.  I married my wife two years later, which was good for me, and I don’t think that any of those guys lived five years beyond that.  Life in the fast lane usually ends much quicker, and I doubt they had any regrets.  But Buck Sexton’s premise that the DNC wouldn’t put out a hit for fear of going to jail—that was grossly naive.  I’ll give Buck a little credit, he’s probably a very nice person, but he’s certainly, obviously naive to evil—which surprises me given his previous profession. But let me say this, I have no doubt the DNC would want to kill anybody who was trying to wreck their plans of putting Hillary Clinton into the White House.  Their very existence depended on it—which we now can see clearly. And they had law enforcement on their side—look at the many crimes Eric Holder covered up—and Lorretta Lynch at the Justice Department.  The times that the “fifth” was invoked by Obama era bureaucrats—and executive privilege. I’ve seen such hits ordered and I was there when the strategies for implementation were created—with the help of lawyers and the justice system. So I 100% believe the DNC functioning at the highest levels of government would be using hit men to eliminate trouble.

But understand this, the use of force is meant to change behavior so whether we are talking about actual killings such as in the Seth Rich case, or the assassination of a talk show host on Fox News like Sean Hannity, the intention is the same—to use force to change behavior. With O’Reilly out of the way all guns are pointed at Sean Hannity—and in spite of that Sean is doing some of the best work I’ve ever seen out of him.  I attribute that not to any special skill that he’s newly developed except for the tendency to trust that he can defend himself against anything.  The key I think for Sean Hannity in this really tough time is that he knows he can defend himself against anything—which then disarms that political left and the villains who sit at big tables and order hits on people to shut them down.  One thing about those “hit men,” the truth of the matter was that they weren’t like the James Bond villains you see in the movies.  They weren’t very sophisticated.  They were just people who lacked a certain amount of natural fear and they would do things that most people wouldn’t even think of.  If you caught them off guard they could be beaten pretty easily.  The only real power that they had was in intimidation, but if you weren’t scared of them—they lost a remarkable amount of power quickly.  After all, anybody can shoot somebody in the back—it doesn’t take anything special.  And if you can take that option away from them, they really have nothing to work with.

Sean Hannity is a well defended person, he’s a concealed carry holder in New York City and now he’s rather proficient at martial arts. He knows how to take a punch and to deflect the energy into a good offense which is much more powerful than most people think.  And having that position, he’s prepared to do a great many things at Fox if they’ll stick with him.  We are fighting pure evil here and some of that evil is finding its way into the Fox management by way of fear, fear of the wrath of the murderous DNC—a dying American political party out of ideas—and bullets.   As we speak they are losing their friends at the justice department and in the courts and soon they won’t be able to have those round table discussions because the judges will be loyal to Trump, not Hillary.  Now that they are afraid for a change, we conservatives must to be willing to take the eye and the heart out of them forever—to step on their neck while we have them down and pop that head completely off.  And we must do it out of respect for justice.  Knowing the difference is the key to everything and you can learn it by knowing a proper martial art, whether it is traditional melee combat or gun fighting.  These days I prefer the gun fighting.  For most of my adult life it’s been the melee stuff.  But having something helps keep fear from your mind because you know you can handle anything they throw at you.  And that is the way to truly disarm evil.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Saving the Middle East: See the smoke, the DNC has the matches

Long before Donald Trump was running for president I had read his books, because why not—he was enormously successful personally and I wanted to know his thoughts on business. He did have for most of the last decade one of the top-rated television shows about project management and general business practices that there was on The Apprentice—so reading Trump’s books was a logical thing to do.  He thinks big and correctly on most things business related and he really knows how to prioritize concepts for actual implementation.   Given that, I thought it was laughable that a bunch of pin-head establishment types actually questioned his foreign policy experience when Trump had been traveling around the world for years networking and building some of the best real estate that is out there—anywhere.  Politicians argued that the experience gained from the private sector would be of little use to Trump.  I thought otherwise of course and cast my vote along with intellectual support appropriately.  Through the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency it was obvious he was going to have good foreign policy.  But it was when he left for his first foreign visits starting with Saudi Arabia, then Israel, then the Vatican and onward that it became clear just how good Trump was going to be.

Knowing Trump through his books and watching him over the years, I feel I know what he’s doing in the Middle East and it’s working. By the reception of him in Saudi Arabia it was clear that they wanted to send him a message that they wanted to be in the United States corner—in a big way.  No other American president in history could have commanded that kind of respect and it comes due to the fact that Trump was successful as a person long before he was ever a politician and all those guys know him.  So with the power of the United States at Trump’s back—they literally rolled out the red carpet with a massive ceremony.  The trip to Israel was followed with similar enthusiasm.  Anybody who thought Trump was going to be a bumbling mess unprepared for foreign engagement was sadly mistaken and you could tell by the dead silence from the political left that the president’s foreign trip was a glittering success.  You’d have to be dead not to see the light of it.

What Trump’s foreign policy visit demolishes is this old aristocratic notion that elected office holders without any merit to their name were somehow superior to hard-working people who arrived at the top the old-fashioned way. That notion has been shattered forever as it will take years for those reluctant lefties to admit just how good Trump has been on foreign policy.  Reading a lot of history I can say that the ramifications of this trip will resonate through the centuries to come.  Teddy Roosevelt had a similar moment during his second term as president when he painted battleships white and paraded them around the world to show that America had arrived on the global stage.  Big speeches from Martin Luther King and John Kennedy came to my mind as Trump spoke about evil and the soul in the heart of Islam.  I could almost see the future exhibits at Disney World’s Epcot Center where Trump’s words would speak to the future generations quoting that speech as the moment that peace in the Middle East started.  Of course there is years of work yet to be done between Israel and the Palestinians, but history will look back to this point in time when it started.  Trump and the show surrounding him was simply amazing.

Meanwhile the small-minded press was stuck all Monday morning trying to push a silly narrative that the Russians helped Trump get elected president—and it wasn’t sticking. The Seth Rich story is picking up steam because there is fire behind the smoke and it leads to a DNC holding the matches.  The Russian story is going nowhere and once the fuel of that narrative runs out, Trump is going to have all these successful endeavors to show for his body of work and the political left is going to really have a bad day then because they will have by that time alienated themselves from the victories of the “American” team.  And all these methods of doing things were always there in Trump’s books if people would have just read them.  He’s doing exactly what I elected him to do—in precisely the correct way.

When you’ve been at the top of the game for as long as Trump has events like this foreign visit are a piece of cake. In Trump’s case the risk is all political which at his age he could care less.  It’s not like he’s trying to set up a nice job after he gets out of office.  Unlike doing deals when his own money and reputation were at stake, this stuff is easy for him and it shows.  Politicians who have never achieved anything in life in the past always relied on the unspoken code of lost aristocracy in such occasions—which is why nothing ever happened but talk.  Trump as a man of action expects results and the people he is dealing with know it, and respect it—which is the largest difference in this case.  People in life respect results driven people and that is why there is a real opportunity to finally have tangible results in foreign policy from this current White House.

The political hate for which so many subscribe is driven largely not in jealously toward Trump but in the fear that what Trump does will inspire more merit based results in the future—which is going to happen regardless of their made-up rebellion about Russia manipulating the American election. Democrats lost the 2016 election because they sucked and their media outlets in bed with them did not have the minds of America as strongly as they thought they did.   And with just a few more months of behavior against President Trump as they have so far engaged, where 93% of all news stories about the new president have been negative—they are losing credibility by the day, yet they can’t stop themselves from making the situation worse.  They just can’t get it through their heads that politics has changed in America from one of subscription to a long dead aristocracy to one driven by merit.  People respect people for what they do in life, not what name they have or what society they belong to.  Trump is the embodiment of merit.

Trump is playing chess several games ahead of everyone else while the world is playing checkers. Or put another way, the world is playing Tick Tack, Toe while Trump is playing high stakes Poker.  In Poker holding the right cards and bluffing when needed is part of the game and people playing the simpler games in the media must understand that Trump is playing this game for goodness well beyond the most intricate manipulations seen in some television show like House of Cards.  Part of Trump’s brilliance is that he doesn’t speak like a master of the English language—he speaks common speak—but he thinks on a scale that defies his ability to communicate it except in non-verbal communication—the way he walks, shakes hands, and stares at the camera.  For instance, Trump’s visit to the Western Wall which inflamed both sides in the Israeli/Palestinian negotiations was purely tactical.  Trump can do something like that where nobody else would even dare it.  After all, from a business perspective, if you always do what you’ve always done……………..you know the rest.  Trump made himself the first U.S. President to visit the site—ever.  Yet he can do it without overthinking the situation because it evokes an improvement in the situation.  It forces everyone to put their cards on the table and show what they have—which a professional negotiator at any basic level should be able to do.

Politicians and aristocratic loving media who wish to report on the pomp of the presidential office don’t like Trump because for a change the job is getting done the way the Founding Fathers always intended. We were never supposed to have a bunch of peacocks working from the Executive Branch trying to appease people instead of driving them to perform.  To perform a person must understand through merit what they are asking and in regard to politicians, they just don’t have it.  But Trump does and that was on full display in the Middle East. History has been made in a big way and the world will certainly never be the same—for the better.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg